


Black, Red, and Gold

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Paint, Chocolate Box Exchange 2017, Chocolate Box Treat, F/M, Implied/Referenced Hand Jobs, Kings & Queens, Masturbation with Paintbrush, Power Dynamics, Rituals, Sorcerers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 14:03:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9660428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: When a sorcerer paints a warrior-queen with the god’s protective marks in his warded ritual chamber, she is a mortal, naked woman at his mercy… but she is still his queen.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tristesses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/gifts).



> Happy Valentine’s Day, tristesses!

“Kneel,” commanded Thadros, son of Hareides. In the ring of salt and sulphur, shorn and naked queen knelt to long-locked, rich-robed sorceror.

The many wards set upon the ritual chamber included that of blood: other than Thadros, only those of the line of Nykla could enter and not die at once in agony. Spirit-lights glowed in niches from stone floor to vaulted ceiling, stronger and steadier than any man-struck flame. They gilded Artamnestra’s skin, denuded of all hair but brows and lashes.

She knelt with right sole and left shin pressed to the cold stone. Her arms were crossed over her breasts, fists pressed to her shoulders; her chin was high, her eyes fully open. She was no stranger to nakedness in ritual, she who had been stripped before the court and examined like a slave in the market after Mavrontios wedded her and before he bedded her. There was power in her mother’s bloodline, power in her sword-trained thews, power in her marriage contract. The courtiers had known it and feared it, even as they licked their lips and adjusted their robes and proffered their lewd felicitations to her new lord and husband. So had the clerics, who feared her even more.

But Thadros’s powers far surpassed hers, and nowhere more than in this chamber, where she was but a mortal woman and he the intermediary of Adion. Beyond its threshold he became her subject again, but she knew and he knew that was but a thin fiction, like the veil that men called “reality” over the vastness of the otherworld. No unwarded dungeon cell could hold him, no uncharmed axe could strike his head from his shoulders. She could strip him of his post, cast him out of court, but she would do so at her peril.

In the thin fiction of the everyday, Thadros spoke quietly and without elaboration, more eloquent in his silences and his gazes than in his words. But now the chamber reverberated with his voice, which was no longer wholly of him, as he lay his hand atop her shaven head: “I call upon thee, Adion, to gird Artamnestra, daughter of Tarasia daughter of Nykla, for battle. Invest the marks I paint upon her body with thy powers, that she may defend her people while her lord, our king, fights far away.” She felt his warm palm vibrate with his voice against her naked skull.

Then he lifted his palm and turned away. Artamnestra heard the unscrewing of lids and smelled charcoal, red ocher, and copper. _Black, red, and gold, does Adion mark his champions_ went the old refrain, sung in taverns across the continent in half a dozen tongues. She felt the air stir about her as Thadros stepped to her front, and though she could not see above his waist without tilting her head back, she knew he held the brush in his right hand, the triangular palette in his left.

“Hold out thy hands, o daughter of Tarasia, that the marks of Adion may brace thy shield and thy sword,” Thadros intoned.

Moving with the slowness demanded by the sense of suspended time one had within the ritual chamber, Artamnestra uncrossed and lifted her arms, splaying her fingers wide. The fine hairs, light and nimble despite the burden that soaked them, stroked across the backs of her hands and around each knuckle. The marks they left were clammy at first, but as Adion’s power sank into them they became lines of focused heat. She heard the soft sizzle, watched the wet gleam evanesce, smelled the scorch of pigment as it dried upon her instantly. Other than an occasional blink, she did not move in reaction.

“Bow thy head, o daughter of Tarasia, that the marks of Adion may undergird thy helm.”

Queen bowed to sorcerer, as any mortal woman would to any intermediary of Adion. The sear of the paint on the thin skin of her scalp was just short of unbearable. But then came the hiss in her ears, the tang in her nostrils, and her head smarted no more than faintly in their wake.

“Round thy back, o daughter of Tarasia, that the marks of Adion may defend thee from treachery.”

Arching her back, she bent herself further, aware how the position must emphasize the upper moons of her buttocks. The bristles splayed against the lower curves of her shoulder muscles, spot by spot, then wrought protective circles around her scapulae. The heat was more tolerable here, even pleasant. When the brush trailed fire down the hollow of her spine, down which Mavrontios’s fingertip had so often slid, she fiercely suppressed a shiver. She suppressed another, and a third, when Thadros adorned the rear curve of her hips.

“Straighten thy spine, o daughter of Tarasia, and raise thy arms, that the marks of Adion may undergird thy gorget and thy breastplate.”

Slowly Artamnestra unfolded, clasping her hands above her head, pulling back her shoulders. Her breasts jutted high, nipples stiff in the cool air. Thadros knelt to her, then, on one knee and one shin as she knelt. His face was inscrutable as his brush shuttled back and forth between her body and the palette to set the marks upon her throat and her breastbone.

She had not expected the bristle-tips to describe spirals over her breasts themselves, starting at her ribs and working outward, then inward: tickling caresses, chased with flame. At their first touch in this wise she blinked hard, then steeled herself as they daubed divinely charged paint upon increasingly sensitive flesh. When they grazed the edge of her right aureola, she sucked in a breath. The nipple ached with its stiffness.

The brush danced away to adorn the other breast. It, like its sister, swelled under the bristles, the nipple throbbing in futile anticipation. She could feel wetness pooling within her, threatening to overrun her chalice. Again, she steeled herself. She knelt not to Thadros ultimately but to Adion, in sanctified ritual, in the body Adion had wrought. Nothing in her reactions could be unholy or shameful.

“Lie thee supine, o daughter of Tarasia, and part thy legs, that the marks of Adion may strengthen thy stride and guard thy womb.”

Artamnestra had learned to school her features from earliest childhood, but she could not control the dull flush filling her cheeks. As commanded, knowing her most intimate reactions could no longer be hidden, she arranged herself in a manner indistinguishable from that of a common whore. Her wetness did overspill, now, trailing over one nether lip to run down her left buttock. The stone of the chamber floor drank away whatever warmth had lingered on her back but did not counteract what had been heated at her core.

Thadros’s expression did not change as he knelt in the embrasure of her parted thighs. The brush glided over the six hard rises of her abdomen, and though Artamnestra was not especially ticklish she strove to keep her lips from twitching. As Adion’s power took hold of them the strokes turned hot, as if Mavrontios were drawing his lips and tongue over her belly on his way down — 

She worried the flesh inside her lower lip with her teeth as she stared up into the shadowed recesses of the ceiling. Soon, this would be done. She would step full-clad out of the ritual chamber, the superior of Thadros in all ways that mattered in the eyes of men, marked with the favor of the god. She would shut herself up for an hour in her rooms, attended only by her two most close-mouthed matrons, and behind the curtains of her couch she would sate her own hunger, one hand between her thighs and the other pressing the cloak that still smelled of Mavrontios to her face.

In the ritual of Adion’s champions, the final marks were embellished on the inner thighs. They were a talisman against violation, especially for women, and they also guarded the warrior from the most outrageous of mutilations. Unlike the painting of her breasts with the marks, Artamnestra had expected the scalding sensations upon this, the most delicate and sensitive of skin. She had not anticipated an almost irresistible urge to arch up into the fiery sweep of bristles, nor the fire seeming to tendril itself upward, inward, whetting further without gratifying. She wondered if Mavrontios’s shaft had stood out hard and aching, too, when Thadros had lent the god’s shield to his loins.

There was the soft click of the palette against the floor, and the rattle of the brush handle atop it. Then Thadros’s voice, with a queer note in it she did not immediately recognize: “No champion of Adion must leave the ritual chamber still aflame with his marks. He does not blush to see his intermediary quench what embers he himself has not.”

It was her only warning before fine hairs, these carrying no clammy burden of paint, touched against the lowest point of her chalice. Artamnestra loosed a sudden moan, sharp and low, and caught her breath as the brush drew boldly up her cleft.

Thadros worked at her with the same efficiency of stroke, the same grave intent, with which he had invested her with Adion’s protection. He attended to each fold, each swelling, the brush lithe even when it must have been soaked with her wetness. Her hips rose to meet every stroke of it upon her pearl, which he did not cease to torment until she shuddered deeply and grunted, then sank back upon a floor whose chill no longer touched her.

She opened her eyes to see him staring down at her. Though he, too, was the master of his features, he but poorly hooded the hunger in his dark gaze. To be fair, the protuberance beneath his robes could not have been masked at all.

“Do you quench such embers in every champion you mark for Adion?” she drawled, voice even huskier than normal.

“Not all. But it is … not uncommon.” She wondered how, earlier, she could not have recognized the note in his voice for what it was.

She sat up on one hip, knees bent before her, and curled one hand around his clothed, protruding shaft. He uttered a breathless, “Your Majesty!”

Artamnestra grinned up at him. “Ah, but in this chamber, I am but a mortal woman, you the intermediary of the god. I cannot offer you my chalice, as it belongs to my lord and husband… but my hand is well trained to the sword.”

He shut his eyes tightly. “You... need not do this, my lady.”

“I wish to do this,” she said, undoing the complex knot of his belt. “I do not grant you the advantage of seeing your queen undone without, at the very least, her seeing the same of you; such privilege is not granted even to your king. Will you gainsay my command, Thadros, son of Hareides?”

He did not reply to her just then, at least not in words; nor did he for a while afterward.


End file.
